Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for the economies of many countriesincluding the Australian economy. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence about theirprevalence, causes and consequences. This paper attempts to improve our understandingabout these issues by using...

Census data show that since 1980 low-skill workers in the United States have beenincreasingly employed in the provision of non-tradeable time-intensive services - such asfood preparation and cleaning - that can be broadly thought as substitutes of homeproduction activities. Meanwhile the wage...

The principal means by which individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency is through labor market earnings. As a consequence, it is natural for policy makers to look to interventions that increase the ability of individuals and families to achieve an adequate standard of living...

This paper investigates the effects of organizational and technological changes on jobstability of different occupational categories in France. We conduct an empirical analysis inwhich we make extensive use of a unique data set on a representative sample of Frenchestablishments...

We present a general model of child labor that incorporates the various componentspresented in the literature as explanations for its existence. Our proposal is to mitigate thephenomenon by encouraging temporary emigration...

Using European Community Household Panel data for nine countries for 1996-2001, Iinvestigate the impact of reforms of employment protection systems on employment and ontemporary jobs for wage and salary workers. Individual fixed effects models are estimated,with the inclusion of country-specific...

Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent adramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Untilthe mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since thenlabor demand has picked up and...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-businessassistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Oneimportant concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is moreeffective and for whom...

According to the Hutchens (1999) model, early retirement is not explained as a result ofmaximizing expected individual utility but rather as a demand-side phenomenon arising froma firm’s profit-maximizing behaviour...

We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eightlabour categories including non-standard types of employment such as marginalemployment. The model is estimated for both the number of workers and total working hoursusing a new panel data set...